Contemporary mobile communications devices typically incorporate multiple communications modalities into a single device. In addition to traditional voice communications service, current mobile phones typically also provide voicemail, Short Message Service (SMS or “texting”), Email, call forwarding, and Internet connectivity. Of these, SMS has, because of its unobtrusive and flexible nature, become the fastest growing and most ubiquitous mode of communication. For many users, texting via the SMS protocol is preferred over traditional voice communication. One of the advantages of SMS texting, in addition to being less obtrusive, is that a text message is much more robust against the various factors that can disrupt live voice communications. For this reason, a text message is often used as an invitation to participate in a live voice call at some later, more convenient time and location. Newer devices such as the Apple iPhone™ have tended to blur the distinction between text and voicemail with features such as “visual voicemail.” However, many mobile phone users have been slow to adopt texting, preferring instead to attempt a voice call as the default communication method. When, for various reasons, a voice call cannot be completed, the caller typically either hangs up or leaves a voicemail that may not become available to the recipient until much later. Another limitation of currently implemented voicemail occurs when a caller would like to be able to deliver a single voicemail to multiple recipients quickly and reliably.
For these and other reasons, there still remains a need to further integrate, automate, and simplify the various communications modes. In particular, there is a need to leverage the ubiquity of text messaging to enhance the effectiveness of live voice and voicemail modes of communications.